New York Times op-ed: “Academic science isn’t sexist”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8078
The journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest describes itself as uniquely “featuring comprehensive and compelling reviews of issues that are of direct relevance to the general public” and that are “written by blue ribbon teams.” One such team—three women, one man—has published “Women in academic science: A changing landscape ” there. Now in a New York Times op-ed , two from the team—Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci , both professors of human development at Cornell University—have summarized their findings.
Their Times piece reflects these excerpts from their journal paper:
* [W]e undertake extensive life-course analyses comparing the trajectories of women and men in math-intensive fields with those of their counterparts in non-math-intensive fields in which women are close to parity with or even exceed the number of men.
* [O]f those who obtain doctorates in math-intensive fields, men and women entering the professoriate have equivalent access to tenure-track academic jobs in science, and they persist and are remunerated at comparable rates—with some caveats that we discuss.
* [O]ur analyses reveal that manuscript reviewing and grant funding are gender neutral: Male and female authors and principal investigators are equally likely to have their manuscripts accepted by journal editors and their grants funded, with only very occasional exceptions.
* We conclude by suggesting that although in the past, gender discrimination was an important cause of women’s underrepresentation in scientific academic careers, this claim has continued to be invoked after it has ceased being a valid cause of women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields. Consequently, current barriers to women’s full participation in mathematically intensive academic science fields are rooted in pre-college factors and the subsequent likelihood of majoring in these fields, and future research should focus on these barriers rather than misdirecting attention toward historical barriers that no longer account for women’s underrepresentation in academic science.
* It is our belief that we have advanced the debate by ruling out many dead ends and shining a spotlight on areas in need of future attention, rather than continuing to pursue issues that may have been historically relevant but no longer predict women’s underrepresentation.
Advance the debate? Williams and Ceci have now sought to do that in the very high-visibility public forum of the New York Times. Here’s their op-ed’s opening:
Academic science has a gender problem: specifically, the almost daily reports about hostile workplaces, low pay, delayed promotion and even physical aggression against women. Particularly in math-intensive fields like the physical sciences, computer science and engineering, women make up only 25 to 30 percent of junior faculty, and 7 to 15 percent of senior faculty, leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame.
Our country desperately needs more talented people in these fields; recruiting more women could address this issue. But the unwelcoming image of the sexist academy isn’t helping. Fortunately, as we have found in a thorough analysis of recent data on women in the academic workplace, it isn’t accurate, either.
There’s no argument that, until recently, universities deserved their reputations as bastions of male privilege and outright sexism. But times have changed. Many of the common, negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur—but when it does, it is largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies. As we found, when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal, it is limited to a small number of comparisons of men and women involving a single academic rank in a given field on a specific outcome.
Williams and Ceci go on to write that their journal paper “reports the results of several hundred analyses of data on hiring, salary, promotion, productivity and job satisfaction for eight broad fields of science at American universities and colleges,” leading to the conclusion that “with a few exceptions, the world of academic science in math-based fields today reflects gender fairness, rather than gender bias.”
They ask, “So if alleged hiring and promotion biases don’t explain the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields, what does?” And they answer, “According to our research, the biggest culprits are rooted in women’s earlier educational choices, and in women’s occupational and lifestyle preferences.” They emphasize that “women can and do succeed in math-based fields if they develop interest in them and commit to them.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.